Reflections of Reflections
by twisted-by-an-everlasting-wind
Summary: I wrote this story in response to a challenge one of my friends gave me to take the first and last chapters of Gregory Maguire's "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister" and, changing as little as possible, write my own story to go with them.
1. Chapter 1

**Reflections of Reflections**

twisted-by-an-everlasting-wind

_Alone…_

_From childhood's hour, I have not been_

_As others were, I have not seen_

_As others saw, I could not bring_

_My passions from a common spring._

_From the same source I have not taken_

_My sorrow; I could not awaken_

_My heart to joy at the same tone,_

_And all I loved, I loved alone…_

-- Edgar Allen Poe


	2. The Legacy Lives On

**Reflections of Reflections**

The Legacy Lives On

_Probably, probably we_

_Learn as we live_

_And then we_

_Forget as we live_

_Things with a beginning_

_Will end someday._

_As time passes, we_

_Are contaminated._

_We are sad._

_For the things which must be protected,_

_I will sacrifice everything again today._

_But I won't say anything, never again;_

_Because the words are so_

_Weak against time._

**Reflections of Reflections**

The Legacy Lives On

~1~Stories Reflected in Glass

Hobbling home under a mackerel sky, I came upon a group of children. They were tossing their toys in the air, by turns telling a story and acting it, too. A play about a boy who is possessed by an evil demon. Full of hatred, he runs into the darkness to find and kill his sister. There the great turnabout. He meets a girl and is stricken by love of her. His desire overshadows his pressing need for the death of his sister, who alone in this world could banish the demon and reclaim her brother's soul.

I listened without being observed, for the aged are often invisible to the young.

I thought: How like some ancient story this all sounds. Have these children overheard their grandparents revisiting some dusty gossip about me and my kin, and are the little ones turning it into a household tale of magic? Full of fanciful touches: magic powers, a happy ending? Or are these children dressing themselves in some older gospel, which my family saga resembles only by accident?

For children, spirits can enter into the physical, shadow and darkness into light. When we grow older, we learn that it's far more common for light to fade into shadow. Darkness follows and never fades.

Nothing in my childhood was charming. What fortune attended my life was courtesy of fear, grief, and murder. And nothing in my childhood was charmed. Or not that I could see at the time. If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.

Besides, what kind of magic is that, if it can't be seen?

Maybe all time-wearied crones recognize themselves in children at play. Still, in my time, we girls rarely cavorted in the streets! Not hoydens, we!—more like grave novices at an abbey. I can conjure up a very apt proof. I can peer at it as if at a painting, through the rheumy apparatus of the mind…

…In a chamber, two girls, sisters of a sort, are bending over a hole. The cover has been set aside, and we are staring at the water within. The surface is a scattering of ripples. But beneath the ripples, in some lost blue, a mirror. The rounded glass of its surface hasn't survived its journey intact. It has shattered in two.

We each take a part. How children love the broken thing! And a puzzle is for the piecing together; especially by the young, who still believe it can be done.

We wander aside, into the daylight—paint the daylight of childhood a creamy flaxen color—two girls at a window. The edges of the disk scrape chalkily as we join them. We think the picture in this glass tells a story, but its figures are obscure. Here the blue line is faded; here it is sharp as a crystal blade. Is this a story of two people, or three, or four? We study the full effect.

Were I a painter, able to preserve a day of my life in oils and light, this is the picture I would paint: two thoughtful girls with a broken lens. Each piece telling a story. In truth, we were ordinary children, no calmer than most. A moment later, we were probably squabbling, sulking over the lost secrets of the mirror. Noisy as the little ones I observed today. But let me remember what I choose. Put one girl into shadow, where she belongs, and let light spill over the second. Our evening-star, our Ariondrea.

Ari was the prettiest child, but was her life the prettiest tale?

Dusk listens to my recital, but my quavery voice has learned to speak bravely too late to change the story. Let her make of it what she will. Words haven't been my particular strength. What did I see all my life but pictures?—and who ever taught the likes of me to write?

Now, in these shriveled days, when light is not as full as it used to be, the luxury of mirrors is long gone. We pay heed only to those objects of use, and when they crack, we discard them in the sylvan garden beyond, to be buried by oak leaves. All green things brown. I hear the youthful story of my family played by children in the streets, and I come home muttering. Dusk reminds me that Ari, our Ari, our Shadow-Dancer, is dead.

She says it to me kindly, requiring this old head to recall the now. But old heads are more supple at recalling the past.

There are one or two windows into those far-off days. You have seen them—windows of canvas that painters work on so we can look through. Though I cannot paint it, I can see it in my heart: a square of linen that can remember an afternoon of relative happiness. Creamy flaxen light, the blue distortion of distance. Girls believing in the promise of colors.

It isn't much, but it still makes me catch my breath. Bless the artists who saved these things for us. Don't fault the memory of their choice of subject. Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be recognized for what it is. Indeed, were Ariondrea to return from the dead, would she even recognize herself, in any portrait on the wall, in any figure reflected in glass, in any nursery game or fireside story?


End file.
